Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia by Sanjukta Sunderason;Lotte Hoek;

Author:Sanjukta Sunderason;Lotte Hoek;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350179196
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

5

What got ‘left’ behind

The limits of leftist engagements with art and culture in postcolonial Sri Lanka

Harshana Rambukwella

Introduction

Writing in 1972, twenty years after its original publication, Ediriweera Sarachchandra – considered one of twentieth-century Sri Lanka’s Sinhala-language artistic titans – attempted to defend his artistic philosophy in the preface to the second edition of his much-maligned book of literary criticism kalpana lokaya (The World of the Imagination):

This book has been more objected to rather than being critiqued. The objections arose because of the phrase ‘kalpana lokaya’ in its title. What is literature if it is not an imaginary product of mankind? It is true that literature has been imagined based on the physical world which is accessible to our senses. But it is a world that is only accessible to our minds and imaginations.

I sometimes wonder if those who objected to ‘kalpana lokaya’ did so due to their limited linguistic knowledge. I do not know if they understood it as ‘THE IMAGINARY WORLD’. I used it in the sense of the ‘THE WORLD OF THE IMAGINATION’. [emphasis original]1

Sarachchandra was responding to the heavy materialist critique his book encountered in the two decades since its publication in 1958. The 1950s, when Sarachchandra emerged as a dominant artistic force in Sri Lanka, was a time of major artistic production and innovation in postcolonial Sri Lanka. It was also a time when the nascent Sri Lankan nation state was taking a decisive turn towards the institutionalization of majoritarian Sinhala nationalism. In 1956, two years prior to the publication of Sarachchandra’s kalpana lokaya, S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, the fourth prime minister of independent Sri Lanka, came to power riding a wave of Sinhala and Buddhist nationalist sentiment. Bandaranaike was backed by a core village-based constituency – colloquially dubbed the panca maha bala wēgaya or ‘the five great forces’ – comprising Ayurveda doctors, school teachers, the Buddhist clergy, farmers and workers.2 For many Sinhala nationalists the year 1956 rather than 1948 – the official year of independence – marked emancipation from a West-sympathizing comprador political class. Another seminal figure in twentieth-century Sinhala literary culture, Martin Wickramasinghe dubbed it the ‘fall of the Brahmin/comprador’ class – bamunu kulaye biňda wætīma.3 There was much expectation that this was the dawn of an indigenous economic and cultural revival – though subsequent events dashed many of these hopes. The political economy of the moment in which Sarachchandra wrote kalpana lokaya was therefore one characterized by a strong decolonizing thrust and a turn to indigeneity. It was also a moment of cultural invention (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) when a new cultural and artistic script was being crafted for the newly independent nation. The Sinhala term for this trend in the 1950s was deshiya, meaning indigenous in a broad and inclusive sense. But jostling for influence was another discourse termed ‘apekama’ (loosely translating as ‘ourness’). apekama unlike deshiya was more about an exclusivist sense of Sinhala identity and pride premised not simply against a perceived ‘West’ but also premised against the culture and social practices of internal others such as Tamils, Muslims or Burghers or Eurasians.

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